Achievements and failures

Nikola Popovski

The end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 was a good occasion to assess the achievements and failures of economy throughout the world, as well as Macedonian economy. As usual, depending on whether the assessors are government or opposition, pro-government or pro-opposition, the estimates for the domestic economy vary from the fact that the results are excellent and the assumptions for future even better development, embodied in the statement “key 10 positive economic indicators and benefits in 2018”, all the way to the fact that the Macedonian economy is experiencing a severe failure embodied in the statement “the economic 2018 was catastrophic for citizens and businesses”.

Objectively, the Macedonian economy has never been in good condition, neither before nor after declaring independence, nor before one or another government in the country, and it is constantly struggling with difficult and serious problems. Of course, the economy occasionally shows some modest results or major failures, with the latter being much more regular and often more traumatic, but it has never been able to satisfy even the minimal expectations of its citizens. Of course, it has never failed so much to get into situations that, for various reasons, have experienced, for instance, Serbia with its hyperinflation and low standard in the first half of the 1990s, Bulgaria with the lack of basic food products in the middle of the 1990s and the collapse of the Albanian economy at the same time, or Greece at the time of its formal bankruptcy in the post-2009 global crisis. When the Macedonian economy, such as it is – one of the worst on the European continent, has good moments, it can not achieve anything remotely significant and visibly well, but when it is in a fairly hopeless and bad state, it does not leave the citizens without their personal and public needs. It is in a constant state of bare survival. And so it was in 2018. It delivered some modest results, but did not deliver some visible results and remained far behind the promises and expectations, but did not experience any collapse or decline that could have been serious.

To assess this previous year objectively, it is best to analyze the standard, common and some other significant macroeconomic data. It is an objective approach without bias, but for that we will leave it first to be published as a whole, sometime by the end of March 2019.

The same goes for movements in the world economy, which, according to the forecasts of the most important economic institutions in the world, grew by about 3.6-3.9 percent in 2018. This is satisfactory, and thus it allows people in the world to continue to live in a better and rising standard, bearing in mind that the world’s population is growing at a much lower speed than the global economy. The problem of an increasingly widespread distribution of newly created income will still be a major challenge for the world. But in the meantime, we can consider some other important and interesting data and facts about the world economy and the life in the world in general, announced by the World Bank on the occasion of the New Year. One of the most important is the fact that today only about 10 percent of the world’s population or “only” 736 million people live in extreme poverty with 1.9 US dollars or less a day and although that looks a lot, in fact, is historically the best data. Most of this poverty is concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa. The measurement in 2018 referred to completed data for 2015, and this is much better than, say, 1990 when about 36 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. For the past two and a half decades, over a billion people have escaped from that difficult situation. But on the other hand, even 68.5 million people, nearly one percent of the world’s population, were forcibly displaced from their habitats and, for the most part, originated in, but also moved to countries of the Middle East and Africa. Germany, for example, has accepted about one million refugees on its territory, is the only seventh airliners country in the world after Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Uganda and Iran, each with a number of refugees between one and four million people in their territories. It is clear that the economic power of Germany is much greater than all of the rest.

The world and the world economy also face a clear tendency of accelerated indebtedness of the low- and middle-income countries, a “privilege” that only high-income countries had until recently. Their indebtedness in 2017 increased threefold compared to 2016 and reached $ 607 billion, and their public debt in the same year reached 7.1 billion (7.100 million) dollars, as opposed to, for example, $ 3.1 billion in 2007. More than 1/3 of these countries are already heavily indebted with external debt accounting for over 60 percent of their annual GDP. As can be seen, the Macedonian upward trend is within the same negative trend in low- and middle-income countries in which we as well belong.

Another, though not economical, important fact is that the planet is still heating up rapidly. Last year, the planetary warming reached 1.0 Celsius degree more compared to the pre-industrial age and it is induced only by human activities. Many activities need to be undertaken by the year 2040 to keep the warming at the growth limit to 1.5 degrees Celsius and not exceed the 2-degree limit, which would allow sea and ocean levels to rise by only about 10 cm.

At the same time, population migration to cities is accelerating. If in 1960 1/3 of the population on the planet lived in cities, in 2018 it is already 55 percent, and by 2050 that population will reach about 2/3 of the total. Urbanization is very increased. It seems that Macedonia is moving exactly according to the pattern of the world’s population, although it pays for its own cost of deterioration of living conditions in the cities for which we are all witnesses.

For us, it would be comforting, if it is not defeating for the world, the fact that, according to the SB data, as many as nine out of ten inhabitants of the planet breathe polluted air. The most polluted region in the world is the Eastern Mediterranean, to which we are broadly speaking. The World Health Organization estimates that about seven million people die of overcrowded ambient and domestic air every year in the world. An additional problem of similar nature is that over 1/3 of the world’s man-made waste is unloaded or burnt outdoors on a daily basis. In high-income countries, this problem exists with only about 2 percent of the waste, but in the underdeveloped countries it is as much as 93 percent. From a Macedonian point of view, it seems that the road to success is quite far.

Regarding education, the situation is dramatic in terms of how much knowledge students have. The testing that was supposed to show the students’ knowledge as the equivalent of years spent in formal education showed dramatic results. While in developed high-income countries the indicators are between 11 and 12 years old, which is the de facto equivalent of their formal education, among the middle-income countries this indicator ranges between 8 and 10. Macedonia, albeit a medium-income country, unfortunately, has an indicator of only 6.8. We are the only European country with an indicator below 8.8 which should be more than an alarm for the public education system. Our students, de facto, complete levels of education that are far from appropriate for their knowledge. It is defeating for the present and future of our country and our society.

Finally, something about gender equality. In a world in which the population approaches the number of 7.7 billion people, there are as many as 2.7 billion women who, de facto, do not have the same job choice as men. Fortunately, Macedonia is not in countries with such a restriction. A light that can serve as an example that if you are willing, a world standard in a certain area of ​​life can be achieved.